The first presentation in the Barbican’s
bite strand to use the theatre
space of the neighbouring Guildhall School of Music and Drama is also
the fifth visit here by the former bad boy of Canadian puppetry, Ronnie
Burkett. Burkett’s works are usually thought-provoking, even
disturbing, and unashamedly sentimental as well as technically
audacious and fascinating. This time the technical wizardry is fully in
evidence: not only does Burkett himself take an active role as a
character in the story (a move which is heresy to conventional
puppetry), but several of his marionettes even manipulate puppets of
their own. However, instead of mental handicap, rape, war or Nazism
(all of which have featured in one or another of his previous
presentations here), the eponymous Billy Twinkle – portrayed primarily
by Burkett himself – is a cruise-ship puppeteer undergoing a mid-life
crisis.

It is hard not to read this at autobiographical at least to some
extent. Burkett does not work cruise ships and has certainly never
simply settled for the kind of schlock that Billy peddles, nor I’m sure
was his relationship with his mentor Bil Baird much like that of Billy
to Sid Diamond, who appears in ghostly, bunny-eared hand-puppet form to
a suicidal Billy before showing him various scenes from his own life.
But young Billy’s obsession with marionettes while growing up in Moose
Jaw, Saskatchewan has enough parallels with Burkett’s own childhood in
Medicine Hat, Alberta, and much of the show seems to consist of
animated versions of his inner debates about the puppeteer’s
relationship with his figures, his craft and his audience.

That makes it a less intense and compelling experience, but also
somewhat easier for being less demanding. We can simply enjoy the
second-order puppetry (including a deliciously awful evangelical rap in
which a Christian woman in marionette form manipulates her own
glove-puppet Jesus), the jokes (among them – forgive me, but I have to
acknowledge it – the most original knob gag I have seen in years) and
the mastery of storytelling so that Burkett keeps us from ever once
questioning a six-foot man conversing with an 18” puppet on entirely
equal terms, a world away from antique children’s television. He even
almost gets away with using the epilogue to The Tempest, but then can’t resist
giving himself the very last word.